Updates, issues and planned works

Please note that the offices in Huntingdon will be closed between 5PM 22nd Dec and 9AM January 2nd 2018.

Over this period, urgent telephone support calls will still be answered when calling 0845 330 0666. Email support tickets will be handled intermittently, so if the need is urgent, please call the support line who will escalate if appropriate under the SLA.

Our supplier portals will also be “frozen” so we won’t be processing any new orders during this period.

We are planning a UPS replacement in our data centre in THE following recent problems caused by it, as the rack appears to be at risk of a power loss whenever we work near it. We have a replacement and we plan to swap to that and then investigate at a later date the cause of the issue on the current UPS.

This will mean a brief downtime of some hardware in the rack. Currently only ADSL/FTTC lines will be customer affecting there, which should just drop and then auto connect at another of our POPS. This will happen during the course of Saturday evening.

If after this work is completed and a router reboot, you’re still unable to connect, please contact support in the usual way.

The email servers are being upgraded over the weekend starting late on Friday evening to a pair of faster mirrored servers. This won’t affect everyone but during the course of this migration email will appear to have disappeared from in-boxes but this isn’t any cause for concern and is merely a side-effect of the migration process.

No email will be lost; it’s just the final synching process needed to improve the mail-servers for everyone. During the course of the weekend the email should fully re-appear.

New email will be continue to be delivered straight away – older emails will be restored as the sync process progresses. Any security certificate error messages can be safely ignored for the duration of this migration. These will disappear after both servers are finally fully synced

thos is work is completed if there are any issues with your mail please contact support via the normal routes ASAP.

The email servers are being upgraded over the weekend to a pair of faster mirrored servers. During the course of this migration email will appear to have disappeared from in-boxes but this isn’t any cause for concern and is merely a side-effect of the migration process

No email has been lost – it is in the process of being synced. During the course of the weekend the email should fully re-appear.

New email will be delivered instantly – older emails will be restored as the sync process progresses. Any security certificate error messages can be safely ignored for the duration of this migration. These will disappear after both servers are fully synced and updated.

We have seen the services starting to recover and our normal traffic profile is virtually back to normal. Any subscribers still to reconnect may require a router reboot if the issue persists.

The fault is still open with our supplier until the overall service has been restored. Our apologies again to those affected.

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One of our back-haul providers is aware of an ongoing issue affecting a small section of our lines which is causing either packet loss or intermittent connectivity or sometimes both. NOTE: This isn’t affecting all lines but the following STD codes are those seeing issues through this supplier. We expect an update by 14.30. In the meantime, we apologise if your line is one of those affected.

We have become aware of another power issue in Harbour Exchange Square. This occurred this afternoon while no work was being performed by ourselves.

We have raised this to the Data Centre (Equinix) requesting an urgent update. We also have an engineer en route to the site to assist as needed.

Most broadband and leased lines should be working although there will be issues for any service ONLY connected at HEX.

More as soon as we have an update

update: 6:30pm The core issue is now resolved and we are seeing all services in HEX back up and running. We are continuing to check for any remaining issues. There was a issue earlier affecting new FTTC/ADSL logins that was resolved. If you are still seeing an issue please call or email support via the normal routes.

We are continuing to work with Equinix to understand the root cause of the issue

We have lost power to our rack in Harbour Exchange Square. Our UPS held power for a while but the batteries are now exhausted meaning that services that are provided from Harbour Exchange Square are currently affected – this primarily relates to some of our Leased Lines which are single homed. Most other services have re-routed via alternative Data Centres.

The Data Centre Technicians are working to restore power to the rack asap and we will then expect to see services recover here.

We will update this further as we have the updates.

Note this does not affect services (including leased lines) from other data centres – although there may have been some network instability initially

We are sorry for this issue

UPDATE 14:15 We are starting to see power restored to our rack though there are still some service affected – many are now restored. We are working through these issues and will update this further – However in many cases you should see service restored now

UPDATE 14:22 Equinix (Our Data Centre Supplier in HEX) have just emailed a Incident Update confirming a possible power issue at the facility. We are continuing to see services restore. There are a few remaining services down and we continue to work to resolve these asap. NOTE we have used the opportunity with the power loss to complete the UPS batter replacement – so that there will be no further maintenance on the power within our rack and in the unlikely event of another power fail we now have new batteries in the UPS

UPDATE 15:30 We have restored most services now although it seems the power failure has caused a switch to fail in the rack. All critical services have been moved off of the affected switch and a replacement is being organised to swap out hopefully later this afternoon/evening. There should now be no affected services – However the network should be deemed at risk due to the reduction in redundancy. We will update this once the switch replacement starts

UPDATE 21:10 A replacement switch is now in place and configured in Harbour Exchange square and the remaining services (and resilience) are now restored. There is a need to investigate the power issue further and the data centre may need to change the breaker we are connected to. However this will be a separate planned works and will be announced later. This may be at sort notice BUT will be out of core hours – and will not be today.

We believe service is now fully restored – IF anyone has any ongoing issues please raise them to support via the normal means.

Our in rack UPS in our Harbour Exchange PoP is showing a possible battery failure. We have a replacement batteries and will be replacing these tomorrow (23/09). These can be swapped without removing power. However with any activity there is a small risk of disruption to services connected to this rack

UPDATE: It appears there may be a more serious issue with the UPS than failed batteries. A short time ago we lost all Power in our HEX PoP which caused a period of Network instability

We believe that all Network access with the exception of services directly connected to HEX is now up. We are working on HEX to bring service back asap

UPDATE 13:50 The Data centre have located a trip has failed which has lead to no Power being available to our rack. The Data Centre technicians are working to restore power to us as a priority. We expect a further update very shortly

10:23am UPDATE: the supplier reports that the problem has been resolved and we believe that all circuits are now back online. Affected circuits may need to reboot their router to bring their session back on stream.

The following exchanges are affected by this issue since 6.21am this morning.

BT and the supplier engineers are en-route to work on-site. No time to fix yet but we will update here as we hear more.

One of our carriers is performing some planned works on their interconnect in Telehouse North. We have resilient interconnects in other locations, however during the work you may see your connections drop and re-connect over our alternative interconnect.

The work is scheduled for between 29/8/2017 22:00 and 30/8/2017 06:00.

Most circuits will automatically re-conect but a few may require a re-boot or 30-minute power down. If there are any issues please contact support via the normal routes